Chapter Text
Everything about his power screams at him to destroy from the moment Daiki shoots him point blank in the face. It’s not an excuse, nor was his fear, but there are three cards in his pocket with clear and colored faces where all of his Kamen Ride cards had returned to their useless state… who knows when. It could have been when he entered this form, when Daiki shot him, and it could just as easily have been when Asumu and Wataru faded away. Who knows when they grew in number, for that matter.
(He remembers Yuusuke’s black eyes, Daiki’s gun inches from his face, and then… then what?
A fight. He’d killed people. He knows someone knocked him from his transformed state, at some point, since he lost his camera.
It’s vague, unclear. He… can’t remember. And that fills him with a deep seated terror.)
(Somewhere in there, he lost his camera.)
He doesn’t know, it doesn’t matter, but a voice inside him, maybe his instincts, maybe his powers, maybe even his still jumbled memories, say kill them and things will be set right.
And he think how do I know?
And he doesn’t. And yet.
And yet maybe, he think, maybe he does have to do this. Be the villain. And then, from what his predecessors tell him… die.
And then maybe… maybe it could revive the others? Or something. That feels so inexplicably right. But what if he’s wrong? He’d been wrong before.
His senses are heightened even untransformed, now. It’s been a week and he’s found himself physically unable to remove his belt. Because maybe that’s all he is.
Decade. The Destroyer of Worlds.
He wonders why he made the powers in the first place.
( “You always loved heroes ,” a voice whispers. And that one is a memory. It’s Daiki, an accidental meeting in some world that left Daiki just open enough to admit something.)
He wonders if it was worth it.
There’s a darkness behind him.
(Maybe he hates that that’s how he perceives it, with his new senses. With no denying his purpose, even as he hates it.)
Every Rider is connected to that which they fight. Tsukasa doesn’t know how he knows this, but it rings true. Tsukasa had fought the merging of worlds and Dai-Shocker, on vague words from his predecessors.
…Well.
However, this darkness is…
Kuuga…
“Yuusuke.”
Yuusuke is silent behind black eyes, behind a black and gold suit that strikes a different terror than one where it had been another person behind those eyes.
Even now this is still, to some extent, Yuusuke.
(A not-memory: has he seen this form before?)
This power can kill even him…
“I’m sorry,” Tsukasa says. Because he can’t bring himself to fully fight Yuusuke. Surely. Surely he has this power, he can give Yuusuke a choice.
(Neither of them have a choice in this battle.)
Surely fate would let him see the other’s face before one dies and the other is left with the fate of the multiverse.
Fight him.
He supposes this is his fate.
He had to. He says that over and over again to himself; he had to kill that Rider he has to kill the Riders. He has to destroy everything before the web snaps back to full size.
Yuusuke’s expression, the way it hardened.
You’ll have to kill him, too.
Tsukasa doesn’t really know how to do the right thing, even now. He’s running on instinct and adrenaline and the fact that he hadn’t been doing the right thing before so something has to change.
Yuusuke is different. He’d started fighting for selfish reasons, but he was so naturally kind and good. Tsukasa could trust him.
Tsukasa has killed before this war, of course, some memories more hazy than others of Dai-Shocker and every monster he’s faced along his journey. But that was different.
Yuusuke had never looked at him like a monster except for when Tsukasa had wanted him to.
Wouldn’t it be easier if he wasn’t begging you to stop this?
Tsukasa rests his hands on his knees in the abandoned building he’s taken shelter in and waits until the shaking subsides.
Well, he had gotten to see Yuusuke’s face.
He commits it to memory.
A ghost .
Tsukasa rememberers once again that this is a world which shouldn’t exist, pieces pulled from everywhere and everywhen. She looks at him and the poor mooks of some merged world lay destroyed.
“Who are you?” She asks.
“Decade,” Tsukasa says. She hmms.
“I’m Tackle,” she says.
“You should leave before you get caught up in this mess,” Tsukasa says. She’s not a Rider. It feels almost strange to talk to someone he doesn’t feel the urge to kill, after two weeks of fighting.
The girl shrugs.
“I’m a part of this fight too, I think,” she says. “My partner… do you know Kamen Rider Stronger?”
Tsukasa had killed him, killed all but one with the merging of worlds nd then whichever one remained had died from the wrong end of a Rider Kick.
She’s already dead, however. Perhaps from another world?
“You should go,” he says again.
“But I’m looking for something,” Tackle argues back. “And I think you’ll help me find it.”
A lost soul with unfinished business …
Tsukasa could make her stay away. He has that much power.
(But he’s lonely, and so is she, and maybe a part of him still wants to help, despite the futility of such an action.)
He considers going home, just once. Natsumi had only ever closed the door to him once, when he had chosen Dai-Shocker, because surely subjugation was better than destruction.
(A silent laugh: as if avoiding this destruction was possible.)
He doesn’t go in, because he knows. He’s always been that monster. He’s why the worlds have merged and Natsumi and Eijiro are left alone.
They would be right to turn him away, just as Yuusuke is right to fight him.
This is his fate. Nothing more than a force of destruction.
He stands across the street for what must be forever and is thankfully left unseen.
(And a small part of him wonders “why me?”)
(“I killed your partner,” Tsukasa says, as Tackle bandages his leg. He could do it himself. She doesn’t pause.
“I figured,” she says, and then she looks up. “But there has to be some reason why you’re fighting, right? Shigeru and I, every Rider I’ve heard of, fought because we were made by evil, but we refused to be.”
Tsukasa almost laughs, but it would come out broken and cruel, instead, he says “maybe.”
She accepts it.)
He doesn’t want to keep killing Riders. He wants it all to end already, but he goes through his cards and still sees all the empty ones.
(The standout, he thinks, is Skull. This new card doesn’t feel the same. A different frequency, perhaps. A different role.)
But this is his fate, isn’t it? To stand up whenever they fight. Even though Yuusuke is still using that form of darkness. That form that fills Tsukasa with an inexplicable feeling of… something.
“You okay?” Tackle asks.
Tsukasa internally shakes off his doubt.
“You should go,” he says, once again.
“Nope!”
He ignores her comment because it doesn’t matter. He’s caught Skyrider nearby, above him.
He has, at the very least, his single duty.